/epg/ - Eclipse Phase General

Old Earth Culture edition

OFFICIAL BOOKS
>Eclipse Phase PDFs
robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs
>Transhumanity's FATE (FATE Conversion)
mediafire.com/download/ae113ujgd3hggpl/Transhumanitys_FATE.pdf
>X-Risks and After The Fall
mega.nz/#F!KwcS0bJK!9KLjZegzebaq-mlPUin45Q

PLAY AIDS:
>10 things you should know about Eclipse Phase
docs.google.com/document/d/1Qnrh0w7H0Jl2_CSsySRxcs4ugw27xsBIk5MYwXq2nDQ/edit
>Advice for new players and GMs
pastebin.com/e0EErN6X
>Online character creator
eclipsephase.next-loop.com/Creator/version4/index.php
>Eclipse Phase hacking cheet sheet
mediafire.com/view/?axe1vs35muk4juh
>Eclipse Phase xls Character sheet
sites.google.com/site/eclipsephases/home/cabinet
>Package Character Creator
firewallagency.wordpress.com/

COMMUNITY CONTENT:
>3 new adventures for your use in convenient PDF form
awdaberton.wordpress.com/about/
>Ander's Sandberg's Eclipse Phase fanmade content, including several modules
aleph.se/EclipsePhase/
>Farcast: An Eclipse Phase yearblog full of items, locations, NPCs, and plot hooks
mediafire.com/download/dhqd1m83xc1wmpj/Farcast_Yearblog_2013.pdf
>The Ultimate's Guide to Combat
eclipsephase.com/sites/default/files/UltimatesGuideToCombat11a.pdf
>Seedware: Another Yearblog
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36317552/Seedware Blog.pdf

/EPG/ HOMEBREW CONTENT
docs.google.com/document/d/19Gy02gp6-WPQ3SoN_24kLPTUu5EjFO8qh_9pjJSVrrY/edit

Previous Thread:

Other urls found in this thread:

ayearineclipse.blogspot.com/2013/12/337-earthcon.html
drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5PwG1MbKr-GUFdzLVlnVzZUSlE?usp=sharing
youtube.com/watch?v=cJIrwNwtzfw
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

So, what other stuff do you think you'd see at EarthCon?

ayearineclipse.blogspot.com/2013/12/337-earthcon.html

Question about time acceleration in Simulspace:

If you are connecting remotely via the mesh from a biomorph squishy brain, can you still go into a time accelerated Simulspace? I can't imagine the brain could handle it. Can you only do it if you are are an infomorph on the Simulspace server?

Well, typically, you access simulspace via hardlines for maximum fidelity. I'd actually say if you're accessing a server somewhere else it's easier, because your brain isn't really doing all the chugging, its the server, but if you try to run it on your mesh insert you'll probably overheat yourself. The only thing that I think the book suggest matters for that kind of tech is the quality of the hardware the simulspace runs on.

>I can't imagine the brain could handle it.
It can, but there's a limit to how much you can accelerate before you fry your brain. More powerful brain architectures, such as those of mentons or hyperbrights can handle higher timescale ratios. I can't remember if silicon is somehow intrinsically better for this kind of shit, but exhumans who are into SPEED tend to be infomorphs hosted in computer clusters specifically designed for high-speed computing.

>tfw reinstantiated after The Fall
>practicing Christian, raised in moderately bioconservative household on Earth
>All the Christians stopped being Christian for some reason apparently
>can't find churches to attend sunday services at on Mars while traveling for your indentured servitude job

>mfw

Prosthumanism and Prostitution

Exsurgents and Exoplanets

Horror and Harlots

I always thought Basilisk hacks were interesting.

I'd wager that the GODDAMNED APOCALYPSE does a fairly good job at convincing people that there's no higher power looking out for you.

I mean, even if you're still kicking after the Fall, there's a good chance that you didn't actually physically make it off Earth, and a practical guarantee that you lost most if not all of your family and friends.

Is the download link for the Agency Char gen not working for anyone else?

>Experimental nanohive goes missing in a nature preserve
>Some time later, the preserve is terrorized by an abomination

Your character/party can easily defeat it. Describe how that happens.

>tfw parents fought their way to emergency evac point during the last days of The Fall, mother getting carried off by TITAN combat drone as big as the family car, father barely managing to keep you safe until you got there
>Father fighting alongside soldiers and other ablebodied volunteers with combat experience while civilians were being evacuated
>you got hit by some TITAN nano-virus weapon after mother was taken, screaming and passing out over and over in the makeshift infirmary/upload/triage tent
>last orbital-capable vessel at this site was shot down in a massive explosion just as it came into view from the car
>emergency uploading/farcasting only, final destination
>never got to say goodbye to your father
>jerks on Mars keep telling you it totally makes sense that everybody stopped being Christian when you confess that you need some solace now and then in between the horrible things you have to do for your indentured servitude job in this life you aren't even sure is really yours, or that 'you' are really even 'you' rather than some abomination that replaced the real you who is rotting on Earth in that tent

>mfw

I also think stuff like forking would convince people of souls being non-existent, or at least not how they were originally described in most religious texts.

The timeline leading up to the Fall would be absolutely packed with shit that fundamentally challenges spiritual and/or religious world-views, and it would be cropping up at a continuously accelerating pace. Suddenly computers can think like people. Suddenly they're able to grow fully functional, thinking humans in a pod. Suddenly chimps, dolphins and fucking octopi can talk. Suddenly death is optional.

It's not hard at all to see how a rapid succession of events like that would put religion into crisis.

There's also the fact that there's a good century and a half (depending on which theory you buy) between now and 10AF, and religion has been in decline for some time already.

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There's supposed to be a lot of people who are still faithful Muslims.

Why? Why not.

Well, a decent chunk of them had already moved out to places like Mars. That said, I don't recall hearing a lot about say, mosques on every street corner or anything either, just there's enough of them in one place sticking to their guns it's notable.

Of course, Martian Sunni is like, a completely different beast then how a lot of modern muslim sects act, kind of like a deliberate construction to keep faith in the face of technology.

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Hey I'm gunna leave this here. I am collecting a collection of eclipse phase art for use of DMing over skype. I thought that you guys would like a good place to dump art, get art, and kind of create a visual cannon of the universe. Anyway I see a ton of art threads around but only a very few of them are sci-fi so this sounds like a good way to even it out with the dragons and grognards.

forgot the link lol
drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5PwG1MbKr-GUFdzLVlnVzZUSlE?usp=sharing

Where's numbers 1-3?

I just got an idea for a character from this. Guess what it is.
youtube.com/watch?v=cJIrwNwtzfw

The characters are stuck in an isolated hab and need to escape. The catch: Almost everyone there was from Florida.

>Florida hasn't been sunk beneath the ocean since 100 BF.

Florida's a fucked up place. They'll find a way.

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This is actually a well-documented phenomenon; in the aftermath of severe social traumas like wars and genocides, church attendance drops drastically as a lot of people do lose faith. The ones that cling on tend to cling on even harder. We saw this in Europe after both World Wars. Basically it's easy to belief in a benevolent loving god when everything's fine, you've got a house and enough to eat. But when those go away, god doesn't quite make sense.

The way I sum up transhumanity's view on religion after the Fall is "We still don't know if God is real, but we're pretty sure we just met the Devil". Like, worry about the shit you KNOW is out there.

I took that screencap specifically because I needed a reaction image of pissed-off Washington driving a car, but I am always glad to see it reposted

Okay, lads. I set up a gatecrashing trip for my group to go to Kepler-10c. From the formula I have, it's 1.29 times as dense as Earth and its radius is 2.35 Earth radii, so its gravity is just a hair above 3g.

Standard gravity stuff lets you ignore up to 2g, and reduces penalties by 1g beyond that. You take penalties after 1.2g. One wound per .2g above the norm. Now, obivously, I'd like my players to be able to function without a -50 to everything from having 5 effective wounds. What else is there that lets you handle high gravity and/or ignore wounds?

Isn't there a drug that helps with gravity issues? Gravy?

Next, equip them with morphs equipped with high grav adapting modifications.

Finally, you're the GM, fudge the numbers. Bring it down to a range you find tolerable.

Addendum: I'm perfectly willing to handwave this and have the guys sponsoring them have stuff prepared for this purpose, because it's a logical step to take before sending people to a high-gravity planet, but I'd like something with the minimum of handwaving for this and future issues.

Yeah, the Gravy nanodrug reduces high-g penalties by 20 if I'm remembering right. From there it all wound mods.

Grin ignores 20 wounds for duration, but is -10 to perception, same cost per hit as Gravy. MRDR lets you ignore 1, but that's a waste of a dose of MRDR.

Medichines eats one wound penalty, that would be very common for gatecrashers. Adrenal Booster and Endocrine Control are both ignore penalties from 1 wound, but that's a double high and the adrenal boost isn't worth it without Endocrine because you can only use it when stressed. Synths, of course, also can ignore 1 Wound for free, and can be stacked with medichines at least also. So if you want to dope up on drugs, you can easily remove the penalties, or bargain it down to -10/-20, which makes sense, y'know, for an environment which is like x3 Earth's gravity.

Should be 2 wounds on Grin, BTW, in case that wasn't obvious. Or 20 points worth of wounds? What ever makes me sound less stupid.

Advice for dealing with hordes of nanoswarms?

EMP grenades/seekers. Fire. Caustics or adhesives. Thermobarics.

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It was beneath the ocean in 110 BF, but that hardly made it a more reasonable place

>the inner workings of the universe
>as recited by my chorus of gibbering disembodied heads

But it kept Muslims around. And Buddhists, I guess. And, basically, every religion that wasn't Zionism and christianity sort of flourishes.

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What is love?

If you got hit with a TITAN virus there is no way they would risk uploading you.

thats not true at all.

people are more likely to turn to faith after a disaster than they are during peacetime.

there are still churches on mars. there is probably a plethora of religious institutions, its just that most of the people on mars are in fact, Chinese.

Remember that the US and South America became the Jovian Junta, Northern Europe became Titan, and most everybody else fled to Mars and the Inner System.

They adapted to the times. It's explicitly stated in the sourcebooks that Christianity went into decline because it failed to adapt.

Conversely, Martian Muslims, who are considerably more liberal than your typical modern-day muslims, were regarded as a bunch of fucking heretics by the wider (almost exclusively Earthbound) Muslim community.

And the brand of Buddhism that's big in AF is more like Neo-Buddhism than actual Buddhism. We discussed this in some length in one of the previous threads. Basically, people just found that Buddhist ideas such as everything being ephemeral resonate to them in an age when things like personal identity are much more fleeting concepts. It's more about finding answers to a collective identity crisis than about escaping the cycle of life.

I read through the History section in core and have glanced over the rules, it's very clear that this is from the SR4e guys. How difficult would this be to run as someone who still doesn't fully understand the 4e hacking rules?
The amount of jargon already has me worried, but my group is crying our for some sci-fi and I have a shell of a campaign I could easily use with this.

Don't know where you got that idea, but I remember my world religion teacher saying that many Jews that still went to synagogues after the Holocaust reached them had to go in disguise, carrying their religious garments in folded up news papers cause the former Jews would harass them about how god is dead and shit.

What said, EMPs are pretty useless in most situations but they're defiantly useful for nanoswarms.

Keep in mind that at their largest, nanobots are the size of a grain of sand at most. So the only reliable way to detect them is with nano detectors. Then again, if a TITAN swarm is close enough to be detected then you're already fucked, plain and simple. So if you're ever going into a TQZ, bring detectors and place them on scouting drones or at advanced positions as an early warning system.

Can't say for sure, I never read too much of SR to know what hacking in this game would be like. But I would highly recommend reading the entire Mesh section end to end anyways. There's a lot of concepts of technology that are made more clear in that section, especially what the Mesh is and how it differs from the internet.

That's certainly true for small-scale events, like localized natural disasters or isolated instances of mass violence (say, a school shooting). We're talking about events that overturn entire societal structures. Like the other user said, the phenomenon is well documented. It tends to be more pronounced in the post-Enlightenment era, because prior to that people didn't really have alternative explanations for the world and its phenomena, but you can see signs of it as far back as the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.

God on Trial is a pretty interesting film on that very topic. IIRC it's even based on a holocaust survivor's recountal.

What are some good quirks that I can give to a character who has fully embraced the transhuman ethos? A self-enhancement enthusiast, essentially.

I'm looking to convey a degree of detachment from the wider humanity. Something like a social uncanny valley.

Some of the official and fan-produced fiction has examples of fairly fun and interesting speech patterns, but I need it to go further than that, to how the character outwardly acts and presents themselves.

Besides Ultimates or Exhumans?

The character is neither, so yes.

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Since Mecca is a big crater, do they still pray facing it?

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that's usually just >Pray Earth-ward

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A mercurial then?

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Guys i have a question:

Up to now i have generally had the impression of EP that the world has undergone an apocalypse and has majorly changed, but that it isn't a truly grim or hopeless or crapshoot civilization.

In other words i read the subtitle as
transhumanist horror-game, instead of transhumanist-horror game.

Meaning that the game might have horror elements against the backdrop of transhumanism and isn't about the horrors of transhumanism.
The difference being that the second interpretation implies that transhumanism in and of itself is horrible and awful and post apocalyptic and grim.

So:
Is there anyone else who thinks like me?
Is there anyone running a game with EP as an ultimately upbeat or hopeful setting as it has appeared to me from the core book?

Or is everyone committed to thinking that everything must be awful and shit for everyone but the hyperelites?

I think the opposite would be true.
I mean look at when people turn to religions the most:
When things go to shit.
Also what if not an ego is the soul itself?

Yeah, actually, I think the game is transhuman conspiracy and horror. As in, it is a transhuman game "of conspiracy and horror". Ultimately how upbeat the transhumanism is up to the GM, but I think it's kind of a like "horror and conspiracy will always happen", kind of thing, and the setting is specifically transhumanist. Normal shit and transhuman shit will go wrong.

I personally like to see the intersection of very human problems and the transhuman or even crazy advanced tech.

That's how i interpreted it, but the last game i got into here from Veeky Forums literally everyone else thought that it was obvious that an EP game was fairly grimdark, because it's 'transhumanist horror'.

I felt really out of place, and since a random group of people apparently mostly agreed on this i needed to know whether everyone thought like that.

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Wasps are cute.
I would totally bioengineer a tiny honey producing wasp army.

Gardener insects are pretty scary with the swarm rules.

My players once "raided" a growhouse trying to find a Petal dealer and set off security causing a couple of gardner wasp swarms to start trying to tag them and it freaked them the fuck out. The hacker bolted all the way back to the front door, and was basically like "Okay, I'll set about brute-forcing the network from back here, good luck guys".

Wasps are still cute tho.
I'd give my muse the alternate form of a wasp swarm.
Or a cross between a bee, a bumblebee and a wasp

>Wasps are cute
No. Just no. Wasps are horrible, horrible creatures.

Wasps are beautiful.

And terrible.

Wasps are nice.
I seriously don't understand the hatred for them.
They used to land on my plate during the summer and i used t give them tiny bits of ham to carry away.
Once we accidentally bit into the same sandwich at the same time in the same place and i got stung.
That's about it.

>yellow jackets
>incarnation of evil
pick both

oh shut up.

Make me.

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Would the structure of Saturn's rings allow applications in space combat? Stuff like using them for cover or as a barrier. I'm thinking about doing some ring flyer on ring flyer violence and I'm wondering about their impact on that.

We get it wasps trigger you, fucking lil bitch

If you want to run an upbeat, utopian game, you can always set your game in autonomist space. Poverty and crime don't exist there, and everyone's more wealthy, more intelligent, and all around better people than those living sunward. The inner system is only crap because the hypercorps still use barbaric, outdated means of production.

This isn't autonomist bias, this is an objective fact of the setting.

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It's not really about wanting an upbeat game, it's just that people seem to think that EP means that the whole species is fucked, and these are just the last degenerate throes of a dying species.
'Cuz i mean c'mon how awful a notion to switch bodies!'

Or something like that.


I meanwhile think that
-the TITANS have mostly left
-earth is ripe for exploring and reterraforming and while most of the surface has been destroyed it's not all a wasteland
-people can live in the frikkin sun, so there's a whole new array of experiences to be had
-we have contact with alien species who are friendly giving us whole new worlds of diplomacy and possible friendships
-the TITANs have left us the gates and we can explore countless exoplanets FTL and terraform them to our liking
-a lot of people died, but over a billion survived, and who knows if there aren't many more in stasis on earth, or in disconnected databanks on earth.
-unless you're literally an indentured you have a better quality of life than the average person BF, thanks to cheap nanofabs, gene cleaning and manipulation
-you can be literally whoever you want and even be a whole new species if you have the resources
-if you're indentured your contract is limited, and probably still don't suffer
-and you're literally working to get a new body, so there's motivation for you.
-forking your ego opens up whole new arrays of experiences.
-you can have a quiet life doing almost nothing, XPstream everything for cash, be a hero for FIREWALL, or be a 6 foot sentient penis. the world is open to you
-last not least you can not die. backup plans are available from really basic ones to multi backup cortical stacks depending on how much money you have

You should reduce your daily intake of devcock.

I never understood this comic. Of all the flaws you could point out about the anarchists; the shitty justice system, the lack of wealth and ambition, you chose this.

I actually don't like the Autonomists as written, but they are objectively the "good guys" of the setting, and the inner system is reserved for backwards, corporate drones and their gerontocrat overlords. The setting makes no attempt to contradict this.

Has anyone done a campaign where the inner systems win?

I didn't interpret the core book like that.
The inner system seems pretty nice overall.

It's also not about winning, it's about living together everyone the way they want.

>the inner system is reserved for backwards, corporate drones and their gerontocrat overlords. The setting makes no attempt to contradict this.
Except that the autonomists are a teeny tiny minority in the setting that only still exist because of the statist Titanian fleet and because Father Jove had a point to make. The PC is by far the largest population, it actually is the New Rome.

Also, anarchists are literally the perfect host societies for exsurgent infection.
>Unrestricted nanofab means that a digital infection can very quickly become nanoplague
>Relatively unprotected, free-for-everyone mesh means that digital infection spreads much quicker
>Cyberbrains in everything means, guess what, more vectors for digital fucking infection to become nanoplague!
>Small, isolated communities means that habs can be taken over one by one as the infection spreads
>"Accept literally anyone" means stealth exsurgent breeds can slip in and fester
Good or bad guys, they're still the Typhoid Mary that might well spell transhuman extinction.

Yes, I've ran a game where Locus became an exsurgent hive and was destroyed by the Jovians. The inner system didn't "win", but the only anarchist habitat with over a million souls exploding really soured how people view anarchists, even the Titanians.

Yeah, I suppose Anarchists experimenting with TITAN tech could lead to a pretty Lovecraftian scenario. He did warn about the consequences of science and how it could lead to our undoing.

lol, that ain't gonna happen: Most people don't know what they want.

>Except that the autonomists are a teeny tiny minority
>Also, anarchists are literally the perfect host societies for exsurgent infection.

Maybe that's why anarchists make up such a small minority: Every other hab could be blowing up.

What about the ones who say they want to be/keep being prostitutes?

They'll get bored of it soon.

Is 'soon' after you get your turn?

Well played...